I usually only share my summer reading list with my students, but to keep myself even more accountable, I thought I’d post my list here. Often, I end up reading completely different things, sometimes out of necessity. Still, I’m hoping to stick to the list this summer! I’m currently reading Trevor Noah’s memoir, Born a Crime. I also plan to complete my re-read John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed. I just read and enjoyed The Killing Spell by the very talented Shay Kauwe and an eye-opener of a book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. Highly recommend both of those! They’re setting me up well for summer reads.
But first!
I’m currently in the midst of a research project. So before I can get to the more for-funsies stack, I am in the middle of reading a heap of academic work on the great Pauline Hopkins, including issues of the magazine she edited in the early 1900s. I first came up with this idea in a survey course I was teaching on African American Literature. I found myself wondering about Hopkins and her perspective on US imperialism, a pervasive subject in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
There is of course Hopkins’s amazing modernist short mystery, “Talma Gordon,” but it gives so little insight into what she may have been thinking besides the story’s opening conversation. I found a lot more by contemplating her editorship. “Talma Gordon” in particular seems sparked by a reader’s letter to the editor about interracial marriage that Hopkins keenly disagreed with in no uncertain terms. If all goes well, I hope to present some of this research at the American Literature Association conference in May. (Incidentally, I plan on reuniting – and meeting for the first time – some of my co-authors (and our fearless editor Andy Oler) from Lingering Inland: A Literary Tour of the Midwest – now out in print!
And finally, the list:
Overly ambitious as always….
- The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu (fiction – horror)
- The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy (fiction)
- Night Owl by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (poetry)
- Too Soon by Betty Shamieh (fiction)
- American Han by Lisa Lee (fiction)
- There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib (non-fiction)
- Angels in America by Tony Kushner (play)
- The Midnight Taxi by Yosha Gunasekera (fiction – a mystery!)
- Eye Level by Jenny Xie (poetry)
